In an upcoming publication in the journals Frontiers in Psychology we present a couple of findings that challenge the prevalent idea that properties of social interaction can be explained in terms of individual properties alone.

There is a growing consensus that a fuller understanding of social cognition depends on more systematic studies of real-time social interaction. Such studies require methods that can deal with the complex dynamics taking place at multiple interdependent temporal and spatial scales, spanning sub-personal, personal, and dyadic levels of analysis. We demonstrate the value of adopting an extended multi-scale approach by re-analyzing movement time series generated in a study of embodied dyadic interaction in a minimal virtual reality environment (a perceptual crossing experiment).

I am happy to report that my application for the 2017 call for research projects issued by UNAM’s “Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica” (PAPIIT) was successful.

The project is entitled “Explorando los alcances de la auto-organización social: desde la cultura hasta la célula” (IA104717). Its overarching aim is to support the activities of the 4E Cognition Group.

Today we will have a workshop on “The Origins and Nature of Contentful Minds: Continuity, Transformation, Integration?” in the University of Wollongong’s Research Hub, Building 19 – Room 2072. The program can be downloaded here.

My contribution is entitled: “Does the evolved apprentice model remain in the zone of latent solutions?”

Then from Wednesday to Friday there will be the 2016 UOW Philosophy Training Conference, where I will give an invited talk with the title “Hallucinations: Inner fictions, outer realities, or something in between?”

Narrative therapy is based on the premise that people are the experts of their own lives, and that they have skills, beliefs, and values that will assist them to reduce the influence of problems. As its name suggests, this approach emphasizes the therapeutic potential of the stories that people narrate about their lives. In particular, its efficacy is assumed to reside in the differences that can be made through particular tellings and retellings, which involves finding ways of understanding the stories, and ways of re-authoring them in collaboration with the therapist.

This workshop will evaluate narrative therapy from a philosophical perspective. In particular, the aim is to discuss whether the narrative practice hypothesis about folk psychology could help to shed light on narrative therapy and its efficacy. Particular emphasis will be given to discuss the potential role of reshaping one’s culturally mediated affordances for action.

Speakers:

Daniel D. Hutto, Professor of Philosophical Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, UOWTom Froese, Vice Chancellor’s International Scholar, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, UOW & Research Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems, National Autonomous University of MexicoGlenda Satne, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, UOWNicolle Brancazio and Jarrah Aubourg, Doctoral Candidates, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, UOWMiguel Segundo Ortin, Doctoral Candidate, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, UOWFarid Zahnoun, Visiting Doctoral Candidate, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, UOW & Centre for Philosophical Psychology, Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp.

Wednesday 16th November 2016
Northfield’s Campus, University of Wollongong
14:00-18:00, Research Hub (19.2072), Building 19

Dates for the first appearances of crucial technological innovations and symbolic material culture are continually being pushed back in time. This trend contradicts the theory that a mutation related to brain function caused a sudden and relatively recent cognitive revolution in our lineage. However, the alternative theory of gradual biological evolution may not fit the archaeological record, either. Traditions within populations are discontinuous in time and space, while independent populations can converge on common practices. Accordingly, there is a growing consensus that changes in the archaeological record of human behavior are better explained by changes in local conditions, such as ecology, demography, and culture.

What does this consensus tell us about the origins of symbolic cognition? Given increasingly older dates for key innovations and the shift in explanatory focus from internal biology to external factors, the mainstream argument is that cognitive modernity must be much older than previously thought. The workshop will critically evaluate the assumed identification of biological continuity with cognitive continuity. It will also consider to what extent cognitive capacities are innate and context independent, and will explore the tensions between such a nativist theory of cognition and recent developments in cognitive science, which emphasize that cognition is scaffolded, extended, and even constituted by behavioral practices. Contributions to this workshop will consider possible explanations of distinctive features of symbolic minds – explanations that may depend not only or mainly on having the right kind of biological capacities but more pivotally on transforming them via interaction with the appropriate culturally created local conditions.

This workshop brings together archaeologists and philosophers working at the University of Wollongong (UOW) to explore the implications of these developments for cognitive archaeology and for cognitive science more generally.

I was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholar Award to come to the University of Wollongong in Australia from Oct 3 to Dec 3 this year. The aim of my visit is to integrate Dan Hutto and his group’s work on radical enactive philosophy of mind at the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry with the empirical work on the earliest symbolic expressions conducted by members of the university’s Center for Archaeological Science.

As part of my stay here I am scheduled to give a public seminar on my research into social interaction. Here is the announcement:

Title/Topic: When me and you are more than two: Searching for the conditions of genuine intersubjectivity
Speaker: Dr. Tom Froese (National Autonomous University of Mexico; UOW VISA Fellow)
Time: 3.30 to 5.00pm
Place: 19.2072 (Research Hub)
Contact: Michael Kirchhoff (kirchhof@uow.edu.au)

Abstract: The most meaningful experiences in our lives derive much of their significance from being shared with other people. However, is it actually possible to share a moment such that there are two subjects of one experience? Mainstream cognitive science is forced to reject this possibility of genuine intersubjectivity because another person can only play an instrumental role in the generation of one’s experience. Essentially, our experiences with family, friends, and loved ones do not involve them at all; these experiences are ultimately constituted by mental representations in one’s mind for which they can, at best, serve as an external cause or trigger. In this talk I question the validity of this solipsistic approach. Drawing on insights from dynamical systems modeling, I consider the basic conditions that would allow interacting individuals to become transformed into one integrated system with collective properties. I then present the latest evidence from psychological experiments that investigate the role that social interaction plays in shaping our awareness of other minds. I conclude that there is nothing mysterious about the possibility of genuine intersubjectivity.

Following on from the philosophy of embodiment by Merleau-Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter we present the enactive conception of agency, which, in contrast to current mainstream theories of agency, is deeply and strongly embodied. In line with this thinking we argue that anything that ought to be considered a genuine agent is a biologically embodied (even if distributed) agent, and that this embodiment must be affectively lived. However, we also consider that such an affective agent is not necessarily also an agent imbued with an explicit sense of subjectivity. To support this contention we outline the interoceptive foundation of basic agency and argue that there is a qualitative difference in the phenomenology of agency when it is instantiated in organisms which, due to their complexity and size, require a nervous system to underpin their physiological and sensorimotor processes. We argue that this interoceptively grounded agency not only entails affectivity but also forms the necessary basis for subjectivity.

Yesterday TV UNAM broadcast a conversation I had with Ezequiel Di Paolo during his recent visit to Mexico. It was shown in the context of a program called “Entrevistas (Im)posibles” and was entitled “Cerebro y Vida Artificial”.